Don't fly without shields, unless you're planning to explore far away from populated space. Some haulers strip the shields off their ships to replace them with extra cargo racks, but if you get attacked without shields, you're pretty much S.O.L. You might, however, be able to get away with a smaller-than-stock shield generator in exchange for more cargo space.

If you want to make money bounty hunting, invest in a kill warrant scanner. Basic info will tell you if a ship is wanted by the faction that controls the current system, but the KWS lets you see all warrants on that ship, regardless of what faction posted them—and you only get credit for the warrants you've scanned before they die.

Lastly, if you have an Oculus Rift, use it with this game. It is AMAZEBALLS.

You can use the Steam community features in non-Steam games, you know. There's a feature somewhere in Steam to let you import a non-steam game. It sets up a launcher for the game in your Steam library and lets you access the Steam Community stuff from the game, but it doesn't actually modify the game in any way - you can still play it without Steam just fine.